The women behind Russia’s most famous writers

Some women even risked their lives for the sake of their husbands' work. Source: ITAR-TASS

Behind some of the country’s most successful writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Bulgakov, there was always a woman.

Nadezhda Mandelstam's brother once
commented that she and her husband - the brilliant, doomed poet Osip Mandelstam
- were becoming so close that "Nadezhda" seemed no longer to exist.

"That's how we like it," she
replied.

Russia's most celebrated writers - including
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often
depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of
creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they
served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.

"What people know about is that Sophia
copied out Tolstoy's great novels, but it was much more than that," said
Alexandra Popoff, author of the 2012 book "The Wives: The Women behind
Russia's Literary Giants." "They discussed things together - there
was a spark. And without it, the ‘War and Peace' that the world admires
wouldn't have been written."

Popoff was born in Moscow and now lives in
Canada. Her inspiration for the book was her mother's own collaboration with
her father, novelist Grigory Bakhlanov. "He read what he wrote during the
day to her," Popoff said during an interview in Moscow. "She would
simply say, ‘you could do better,' or ‘I don't feel it.' She was his best editor."

Popoff considers her parents' relationship
part of a uniquely Russian tradition. English literature could claim prominent
female writers going back to Aphra Behn, the 17th century dramatist. Western
literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Martha Gellhorn (Ernest Hemingway's
wife), she writes, had little interest in, as Gellhorn put it, "being a
footnote in someone else's life."

But
until the mid-20th century, Russian prose was dominated almost entirely by men,
who were lionized as national heroes. Their wives were expected to dedicate
themselves to cultivating their husbands' genius - a role many played to the
hilt.

The model was established by the
Dostoevskys and the Tolstoys. Sophia Tolstoy copied her husband's works,
diaries and letters, working through the night after tending to their estate
and 12 children during the day. She also served as muse, inspiring Kitty and
Levin's love affair in "Anna Karenina."

Dostoevsky dictated both "Crime and
Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" to his wife Anna, and
infused many of his characters with her traits. "Fyodor Mikhailovich was
my idol, my god," Anna wrote, eternally faithful even after nursing him
through a gambling addiction that reduced her to rags.

These archetypes were mimicked, sometimes
consciously, by later couples. Before their marriage, Tolstoy gave Sophia a
written account of his previous sexual exploits (including contracting
gonorrhea from a prostitute), an episode he recreated in "Anna
Karenina." Nabokov, who idolized Tolstoy, did the same with his wife Vera.

Some women even risked their lives for the
sake of their husbands' work. Natalia Solzhenitsyn met her future husband,
already famous for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," when she
was a 28-year-old doctoral candidate. Beyond performing extensive research for
his historical novels, as well as editing and typesetting his collected works,
she engineered the smuggling of his works to the West - preserving "The
Gulag Archipelago" and other crucial texts.

Mikhail Bulgakov based the character of
Margarita on his wife Yelena Many continued to work for their husbands in their
widowhood. Yelena Bulgakova fought tirelessly to ensure the publication of
"The Master and Margarita" after her husband's death (in keeping with
her portrayal in the novel as Margarita, the ultimate writer's wife). After
Osip Mandelstam perished in a camp, Nadezhda lugged his secret archive across
the Soviet Union. (Nadezhda went on to write two fine memoirs of her own,
"Hope against Hope" and "Hope Abandoned").

Such relationships tended to be
all-consuming. As Nabokov would put it, he and Vera were "a single
shadow." Dostoevsky, Mandelstam and Nabokov all said they couldn't write
without their wives nearby. Anna Akhmatova, for one, was astounded.

"He wouldn't let her out of his sight,
didn't let her work, was insanely jealous, and asked her advice on every word
in his poems," she said after seeing Mandelstam with Nadezhda. "In
general, I have never seen anything like it."

Sometimes this dependence was even
physical. Both Nadezhda Mandelstam and Vera Nabokov could be seen lugging heavy
cases, while their husbands strolled around unencumbered.

But some women found this self-immolation
too much to bear. Sophia Tolstoy was a spirited painter and writer; her husband
took the name of his heroine in "War and Peace" from a youthful
novella of hers, "Natasha." But in the midst of her husband's
religious conversion, she began to regret her devotion.

"Everyone asks: ‘But why should a
worthless woman like you need an intellectual life or artistic life?'" she
wrote in her memoir "My Life," which was only published in 2010.
"To this question I can only reply: ‘I don't know, but eternally
suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.'"

After Sophia ceded her role as confidant to
Tolstoy's disciple Vladimir Chertkov, she found herself excluded from his
circle entirely. His acolytes even refused to allow her near his deathbed.
Thanks largely to Chertkov's influence, Sophia was long portrayed as "a
henpecking wife who couldn't appreciate [Tolstoy's] moral genius," said
Tolstoy scholar Andrew Kaufman, author of "Understanding Tolstoy."

But according to Kaufman, modern attitudes
are shifting. "With glasnost and perestroika and their long aftermath,
Russians have become more ready to humanize and even criticize their greats,
and find fault with their moral hypocrisies," he said. "The general
antipathy towards Tolstoy's moral extremism, and how he treated his wife and
kids, has been part of this trend."

Today, with Russian writers such as
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Tatyana Tolstaya winning international acclaim, the
sort of relationships described in the book seem a thing of the past.
"Now, women would rather establish their own careers than dedicate their
lives to their husbands," Popoff said. But Popoff said there are many
other couples, such as Andrei Bely and his wife Klavdia Bugaev, whose stories
remain to be told. "You don't know
where the collaboration begins and where it ends," she said. "These
women were so much in this literature."